Free The Genius by Jesse Kellerman Page B

chef personally presented us with an assortment of gemlike sushi. It was excellent. Hollister called for another round and, midway through it, offered me a hundred and seventy thousand dollars for the Cherubs. I told him that sounded low, especially considering that in giving him a single canvas I’d be breaking up the integrity of the piece as a whole—which really ought to stay together. Without batting an eye he doubled the figure.
    We settled at three eighty-five. That kind of money wasn’t going to make any headlines, but bear in mind that not too long ago the drawings had been bound for the landfill. The pleasure I took in watching Hollister sign the check was secondary to the godlike thrill of making something from nothing, cash from trash, creation ex nihilo.
    After the deal was done I detected a change in Hollister’s attitude, a surge of confidence. Now that he owned, he knew how to act. Men like him believe that nothing is beyond their grasp—be that thing a piece of land, a piece of art, a brand of savvy, a person. Once they’ve paid and order is restored, they can go back to being masters of the universe. It’s a metamorphosis I recognized from years of dealing with my father.
     
     
    I RETURNED TO THE GALLERY that afternoon elated by the deal but depressed about the prospect of losing my art. Mine, and I didn’t feel ashamed to say so.
    When a show goes well, or I make an unusually handsome sale, I will send my assistants home, close the gallery, and invite the artist over to commune with the object we have created together. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a sentimental ritual. But no one has ever told me he didn’t want to do it. Anyone so jaded that he fails to experience a sense of loss— that person, to me, can neither see art nor experience its transcendency. I don’t want to represent him.
    Without Victor Cracke, I stood alone in the vast white space, watching the pages of the drawings billow gently. I took off my shirt, bundled it behind my head, and laid down on the floor in front of the nearest canvas, feeling like a child confronting the ocean for the first time, overcome by its vastness and its melancholy.
     
     
    I LIKE TO ORGANIZE MY LIFE in five-year fragments, give or take. My mother died when I was five. When I turned eleven my father, tired of listening to me, sent me off to boarding school. Then came about five years of getting kicked out of various educational institutions across the globe. Let me see if I can remember the correct order: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Brussels, Florida, Connecticut again, Berlin, Vermont, and Oregon. By the time I got back to New York I knew how to say
dime bag
and
blow-job
in several dialects of American English, as well as Turkish, German, French, and Russian.
    When I turned sixteen, a despairing Tony Wexler—he, rather than my father, had been the one managing my woes—phoned my half-sister, Amelia, and begged her to put me up for a while.
    Amelia and I had never been close. She lives in London, where she has been since her mother and my father divorced in 1957; that also gives you an idea of the generation gap separating us. I saw her once in a very rare while—at my own mother’s funeral, for instance. Certainly I had done little to endear myself to her. I regarded all three of my half-siblings not as peers but shadowy semiparental figures not to be trusted. My half-brothers, who I saw a least a few times a month, are brownnosers extraordinaire, and at the time I had no reason to believe that Amelia would be any different. I set out for London with a hard, hard heart.
    To everyone’s astonishment—not least my own—I thrived. The wetness of English weather aligned with my adolescent sense of impending doom, and the dryness of English humor made more sense to me than the rampant goofiness of American pop culture. At school I managed not to get expelled, and with private tutoring I managed to graduate. I made some of my best friends